Last week, EDF filed detailed comments to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on the approaches it has presented for identifying potential candidates for prioritization under TSCA.

EDF believes the purpose of prioritization is to provide an orderly, transparent process for EPA to use in working its way through the huge backlog of chemicals needing risk reviews and to provide an accountable means by which EPA decides which chemicals need full risk evaluations and which have ample information at the time of the prioritization decision indicating they can be set aside absent new information. Our comments argue for a simple process for identifying potential candidates for prioritization that:

is not overly formalized or regimented;

ensures sufficient information is available or will be developed in a timely manner to inform prioritization, and subsequently risk evaluations, through robust and early use of EPA’s section 4, 8 and 11 information-generation and information-gathering authorities;

proceeds at an incremental pace to build trust and gain experience, and preserve balance between high- and low-priority designations; and

In light of these objectives, EDF recommends using an augmented TSCA Work Plan approach to identify potential high-priority candidates. The earlier methodology would need to be updated to incorporate statutory requirements not previously included – or not sufficiently addressed (e.g., exposure to children) – and to integrate new information.

We also believe EPA could use the Safer Choice Ingredient List (SCIL) as a starting point for identifying a comparable number of low-priority candidates. However, EDF does not believe that the presence of a chemical on the SCIL list alone is at all sufficient for designating it as low-priority. Rather, the SCIL list may help EPA identify a select number of candidates, which would need to undergo a much more robust evaluation to determine whether they meet the strict statutory requirements for low-priority designations.